Methods for Incremental Application Deployment

1. A method for incrementally deploying an enterprise application component on a server, comprising: modifying the enterprise application component, wherein a software developer modifies the enterprise application component using an integrated development environment; automatically modifying a deployment descriptor that describes configuration information for the enterprise application component, wherein the integrated development environment concurrently modifies the deployment descriptor based on the modifications made to the enterprise application component by the software developer; and immediately deploying the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor onto the server; wherein one or more enterprise application components are part of an enterprise application that must be configured to allocate appropriate server resources and specify security requirements; wherein the deployed enterprise application component and the deployed deployment descriptor being modified can be modified directly in place on the server's disk; wherein if the server is not running when the software developer modifies the enterprise application component, a synchronization process is initiated when the server starts to deploy the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor to the server; wherein the synchronization process does not remove or modify other application specific configuration settings associated with the enterprise application; and wherein the other application specific configuration settings were added manually by the software developer while the server was not running.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the deployment descriptor is a specially formatted file that describes each of the components being deployed, their relationships, their required resources, and other characteristics.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein each time the software developer modifies the configuration information of the enterprise application component, the changed enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor can be immediately deployed to the server in the background.

4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: constructing a list of deployable modules.

5. The method of claim 4 , further comprising: comparing the list of deployable modules with the list of modules that were previously deployed upon the server, and updating the deployment descriptor with any changes.

6. The method of claim 5 , further comprising: comparing attributes for each module in the list of deployable modules with the attributes of each module in the list of modules that were previously deployed upon the server, and updating the deployment descriptor with any changes.

7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the list of deployable modules includes Web Applications and Enterprise JavaBeans.

8. The method of claim 6 , wherein the attributes include security roles.

9. The method of claim 6 , wherein the attributes are constructed from settings in an integrated development environment.

10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the enterprise application component is a Java Enterprise Edition application component.

11. The method of claim 1 , wherein only portions of the deployment descriptors that are generated automatically can be modified while manual application configuration changes are preserved.

12. A computer-readable medium having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to incrementally deploy an enterprise application component on a server by: modifying the enterprise application component, wherein a software developer modifies the enterprise application component using an integrated development environment; automatically modifying a deployment descriptor that describes configuration information for the enterprise application component, wherein the integrated development environment concurrently modifies the deployment descriptor based on the modifications made to the enterprise application component by the software developer; and immediately deploying the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor onto the server; wherein one or more enterprise application components are part of an enterprise application that must be configured to allocate appropriate server resources and specify security requirements; wherein the deployed enterprise application component and the deployed deployment descriptor being modified can be modified directly in place on the server's disk; wherein if the server is not running when the software developer modifies the enterprise application component, a synchronization process is initiated when the server starts to deploy the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor to the server; wherein the synchronization process does not remove or modify other application specific configuration settings associated with the enterprise application; and wherein the other application specific configuration settings were added manually by the software developer while the server was not running.

13. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein the deployment descriptor is a specially formatted file that describes each of the components being deployed, their relationships, their required resources, and other characteristics.

14. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein each time the software developer modifies the configuration information of the enterprise application component, the changed enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor can be immediately deployed to the server in the background.

15. The computer-readable medium of claim 12 , further comprising: constructing a list of deployable modules.

16. The computer-readable medium of claim 15 , further comprising: comparing the list of deployable modules with the list of modules that were previously deployed upon the server, and updating the deployment descriptor with any changes.

17. The computer-readable medium of claim 16 , further comprising: comparing attributes for each module in the list of deployable modules with the attributes of each module in the list of modules that were previously deployed upon the server, and updating the deployment descriptor with any changes.